Monday
A Florida judge has quoted Shakespeare while throwing out a case reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. In case you haven’t been paying attention, GOP governor Ron DeSantis has been trying to set himself up as Donald Trump’s successor with a series of authoritarian stunts. One of these involved arresting various African American ex-convicts for fraudulently voting, even after the state of Florida had told them it was okay to vote.
In videos taken of the arrests, both the police and the arrestees are confused by the charges. As in the days of segregation, however, the actual goal of the arrests is to frighten other African Americans from voting. Oh, and to garner DeSantis points with white supremacists, who don’t believe that Blacks should be voting in the first place.
The judge reasoned that DeSantis’s prosecutor had overstepped his jurisdictional bounds. Or, as he put it at one point, “His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”
DeSantis explained that his prosecutor had to step in, despite jurisdictional boundaries, because local prosecutors were “loath” to make the arrests. Once the prosecutor did so, however, he opened himself up to a judicial slap down. And, as it turned out, to a comparison with Shakespeare’s Henry V.
A eulogy to Henry V opens the first of the three Henry VI plays. Henry V, victor of Agincourt, has just died, leading Gloucester, Lord Protector of the young successor, to deliver these words:
England ne’er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings;
His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech:
He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.
Given that Gloucester is praising Henry V, the Florida judge’s use of the passage seems misapplied. After all, he is criticizing the state prosecutor for spreading his arms, not praising him. Indeed, I suspect that DeSantis would love for these words to be applied to him, especially “His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,/ More dazzled and drove back his enemies” and “his deeds exceed all speech:/ He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.”
In the judge’s defense, however, Goucester’s words can be read as a critique if looked at from an historical perspective: Henry V spread his arms too wide in his attempt to take over France, and his son and successor Henry VI—thanks in part to Joan of Arc—would lose everything his father gained. Shakespeare was well aware of this.
So think of it this way: Gov. DeSantis and his minions are charging into areas where they have no business, whether by setting up a sketchy anti-election fraud unit (when there’s virtually no election fraud in Florida), imposing a prominent GOP politician as the University of Florida’s president, duping and then flying Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, and other semi-fascist moves. One wonders whether, like Henry V, he’ll win temporary victories, only to lose the war. Or as Shakespeare himself puts it at the conclusion of Henry V, although Henry arranged to get his son “crown’d King of France and England,” subsequent mismanagement made it so that “they lost France and made his England bleed.”
Instead of spreading dragon wings, how about just working on being a good governor?